"Not counting Broom's god?  I guess the catastrophe-prevention god posting an observer doesn't exactly count as an endorsement per se."

"My brain's still bugging me about the four who I decided didn't make the cut.  Until Maillol gets back to me with their options, I don't feel like I can actually have that horribly unpleasant interview that's looming ever larger in my imagination, but it also feels increasingly awful that I haven't, like, let them know.  Not a problem you're supposed to solve for me, the person who makes the decision is supposed to bear the unpleasant-interview consequences of it."

"Waiting until you know their options makes sense to me. I bet they'll be much less freaked out if you can lay out exactly what happens next. Though, also, you don't have to feel bad, and I think I wouldn't feel bad, so maybe hiring is more my kind of task."

"If we get to the point where you're working with me to decide who to hire, and making your own calls about who to let go, you can handle that part, yeah.  I suppose for this occasion I could have asked you who to keep and see if your judgment matched mine, and if it did, I could tell you to handle the exit interview on the grounds that you apparently knew the full reasons for why they weren't staying."

"They're weaker students? But I am not a fourth-rank keeper and can't say I'd have picked those four, not when I hadn't in fact picked them out in advance. 

Should I let you go off on your date?"

"Give me a long hug and then you can go."

Carissa gives him a hug, and contemplates the exit interviews that she's in fact going to have to give, tonight, once they've figured out what to do next with the girls. 

She is kind of dreading it, which is pathetic. Hurting and terrorizing people is fun and necessary and she hasn't been doing it enough lately.

PL-timestamp:  Day 6 / Night

Keltham enters into his date with Meritxell with only a slight sense of trepidation.

He's mostly worried about strange things his own brain might do to him.  He's only a little worried about whether Meritxell will suddenly decide that she should stop seducing him and let herself be the one seduced during the rest of the date.  Thereby revealing the true illusoriness of his apparently promised rise out of the ranks of the median male mate-value; which is not high enough to get much seduction-work put into you, compared to the amount expected by, say, a woman.

But primarily he is in fact expecting this date to go fine, and if not, he'll deal.

How's Meritxell dressed?  Anything interesting, or does she not, per se, have anything except her uniform?

She does not have anything except her uniform, though at her new salary that should change pretty fast.  She has not apparently decided she should stop seducing Keltham now that she has him, though she's not actually entirely sure how seducing people works. 

The important thing is that she's trying, making any sort of visible effort.  The new gendertrope in him seems like it would be sad, if she wasn't.

He'll ask if anyone has mentioned to Meritxell a certain contract that she'd have to sign if she wanted to preserve her options for the evening getting sufficiently interesting; signing this contract doesn't decide anything, to be clear, it just preserves possibilities in that undecided future.

Yep, Carissa told her and showed her Carissa's, and if it's the same she's willing to sign it.

This does leave the puzzling question of what they could possibly find to talk about during their date, a search that Keltham himself has always dreaded (he says).  They haven't read any of the same books, written fanfictions set in the same universe, aren't obviously on opposite sides of any shared debate; and all of their previous life experiences are probably far too similar for their random childhood anecdotes to have any interest whatsoever for each other.

So, all those men far less worthy than Keltham, who proved unable to wear her in her true shirt-form - what sort of sex has she been having with them instead?

"Some of these redactions are because we're not allowed to know that, but I think most of them are actually because what he was thinking was untranslatable. But I think the approximate picture is that the forces that put Keltham on top of me did that for a reason, and might have been the reason for subsequent interventions to make things more like a dath ilani romance. And we want Keltham to believe that's not true, but it probably is," Carissa concludes the briefing for Asmodia. "Questions."

Who is Sevar a hidden cleric of, then, Asmodia does not ask, because Sevar is apparently managing not to know this.

"I want so much for there to be some way to extract more information about dath ilani romance novels from Keltham, we need that information, it's just, so much not a priority in the Tropeless World where we don't actually care -"

"Wait.  Paxti.  We could brief her on the parts that Keltham knows we know, tell her on full Bluff that we absolutely don't believe it and think Keltham is right not to believe it either, and Paxti would absolutely fly off to pester Keltham about it given permission.  That happens in the Tropeless World if Paxti gets briefed."

"But Keltham might not believe that - is it a disaster if he doesn't - yes it is because then he concludes not just that he's in the Trope World but also in the Conspiracy World because we hid the tropes from him and tried to conceal our inquiry about it -"

"Could Ione just be openly curious, she's visibly different from the rest of us -"

"I'll think about it."

"One thing does seem clear to me, the tropes are things of Probability.  Understanding Keltham's Law of Probability is going to be just as much key to mastering them as knowing the particulars of dath ilani romance novels.  If I had to guess, that's what the not-understandable terms were about."

She's feeling a lot more uncertain than before about tropes being unreal.  Even if there were gods involved in faking it, there could also be tropes making the gods do that.  There could be real tropes involved and gods faking other tropes.

"That seems right to me. Probability and, uh, the thing he jokingly scolded Ione for bringing up. Anthropics."

"Making copies of people, which can produce probabilities of three hundred hundredths, three years after Probability gets taught to dath ilani which means it is still being taught to children."

"In the Tropeless World, would I be urgently interested enough to bother Keltham about 'anthropics'?  No, but Ione might be... he could suspect us being behind Ione's question anyways, it'd be true and we can't stake everything on a dath ilani never imagining a thing that happens to be true.  Ione asking about anthropics doesn't quite have all the same problems as asking Keltham about dath ilani romance novels, there's a real excuse about it being fascinatingly forbidden mathematics.  But it has most of the problems."

"...I don't think I can actually do this without +4 to both Intelligence and Wisdom and maybe also solving some of the problems that Keltham posted.  It feels like I'm just pretending to talk the way I think when I'm actually smart."

"I know. I urgently put in for your headband. If they turn me down I'll go and argue some more about it."

"That will not be necessary," says Aspexia Rugatonn, taking off her Invisibility ring.

Oh.

Carissa is going to end up with the mental habit of assuming the Grand High Priestess and the Queen are watching her at all times. Which is good for her moral development, probably. 

"Grand High Priestess," she says on the off chance Asmodia wasn't sure, and inclines her head. 

Asmodia has never met Aspexia Rugatonn before and it was, in fact, taking her a moment to identify that this is not just a high priestess of Asmodeus but one who's wearing the very distinct Crown of the Most High.

She's so shocked that it takes her too, too long to realize that she should be falling to her knees feeling more terrified than she has at any moment since she wept in the Gardens of Erecura no she needs to not think about that there must be no suspicious gaps in her thoughts what should she be thinking about -

They said that people on the project didn't get tortured she hopes that's true even with the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus she didn't mean, she didn't mean any temerity, she only hoped for the tool she needs to serve Asmodeus -

"I will be making use of this one's time for somewhat over two hours, Sevar.  Perhaps two and a quarter.  You may go about whatever other business you have."

Asmodia stays kneeling with new terror pouring through her.  How many bad things can happen to you in two and a quarter hours?  A lot, more than enough to break you forever before you can die.

Her life is very recently unfucked, and she has had a long long time of being terrified before that, and bad things happening to her, to remember.